---
With little
else to impede their progress, the delegation crossed through the pass and into
a world that seemed a planet away from the barren wasteland they had just left.
The first indication was the thorny brambles gradually giving way to giant
fungi (thoroughly dried out and deadened, but giant fungi nonetheless) and the
bluish dusk continued to grow in intensity until an entire forest of towering
mushrooms – as thick as the oldest Ashenvale oaks, lit from below by their own
phosphorescent spore sacs – spread out before the travellers, watery channels
winding in a labyrinthine fen between the massive stalks. The road led straight
into the hauntingly beautiful swamp, and it wasn’t without effort that the
non-Draenei kept themselves from gawking openly at the dramatic change in
scenery.
The Ambassador
breathed out in a slow sigh. “Zangarmarsh,” he announced quietly. “The only
refuge and sanctuary that the Orcs of the Dark Horde could not penetrate in
their hunt for Velen and what remained of the Draenei. We learned to move with
the swamp waters, slip away like the wind, lay unmoving like the earth while
the fires of vengeance tore at our hearts.” He lowered his head and shook it
slowly, and it was obvious that he was fighting tears. “It was here that those
unfortunate ones afflicted by the Orcs’ fel taint began to … change.” He drew a
slight breath to recompose himself. “Those we now call Krokul – Broken – and
worse.” Theluin, as always keeping pace with the Ambassador, looked up at the
Draenei without a word, but with deep compassion and sympathy in his glowing,
turquoise eyes.
Eli threw a
wary glance at Tuan, halfway expecting an obtuse retort from the temperamental
woman, but she appeared to be quite occupied craning her head around to take in
the spectacular flora – if ‘flora’ was an adequate word for a forest made entirely
out of tall-stalked, alien fungi, interspersed with a marshland replete with
every form of natural phosphorescence imaginable.
Silence fell
among the travellers, but it was amply filled by the sounds of the swamp. The
buzz of insects, the distant chirps and calls of strange bog creatures and
predators, and the constant gurgle and trickle of swamp water being filtered
through iridescent, literally outlandish tubers growing in open air like
semi-transparent balloons of organic, bluish crystal. The ethereal atmosphere
was reinforced further by a light mist that suffused the air, reflecting and
refracting the red and turquoise glow from the broad mushroom heads high above
into the strong purple-aqua nuance that pervaded the marsh’s colour palette.
